Saturday, December 28, 2013

Why I Bought It:
I didn’t. Barleycorn
Brewers is a microbrewery where the customer can brew their own beer. A
friend of mine was given a voucher for his birthday, and invited me along to
help brew and bottle – in return I got a box of beer.

Taste: Lighter
than I expected.You can get through
three or four bottles before you even know it.

What I did while
drinking it: A few bottles went while I was watching Australian cricketer
Mitchell Johnson bowl his way through the English batting line-up. Another half
dozen went on Christmas Eve. Not sure where the others went …

What I did after drinking
it: Kept the two dozen bottles, either to use if I go back again, or for my
own upcoming concoction.

Sunday, December 22, 2013

This weekend I watched the first two seasons of Ren &
Stimpy for the first time since not long after they appeared twenty years ago.
For those unfamiliar with the show, as I saw aptly described somewhere Ren is
an emotionally unstable chihuahua while his friend Stimpy is a good-natured but
dim-witted cat. The show debuted around the same time as The Simpsons and prior
to South Park, but hasn’t had the same longevity or afterlife in syndication that
those shows had.

Watching the show as an adult, it holds up pretty well. One
thing that didn’t really strike me as a kid is just how old-fashioned the show
is in its look and even its plots and characters. The show doesn’t just seem
like it’s from the 1990s; it seems like it’s from the 1960s. Apart from its
old-style animation, its use of classical music and credits put it far closer
to Looney Tunes and Disney cartoons than today’s stuff. Maybe I didn’t notice
it as a kid because most cartoons looked that way.

But while its environment is decidedly that of the world of
the mid-20th century, Ren & Stimpy basically tries to skewer the
values of that world at every opportunity. In the recurring ‘Commander Hoek and
Cadet Stimpy’ cartoons, our astronauts’ flights into outer space are not
portrayed as noble acts of bravery, but as a descent into instability (both
mental and physical) and eventually madness. The household couple that Ren and
Stimpy run into on occasion – the deep-voiced husband with his pipe and robe
and his perfectly pleasant housewife – are on the surface your average
1950s/1960s household, but scratch the surface and you soon see they are semi-freaks
that would teach their babies to walk by using fire coals, and have dozens of
uses for rubber nipples. And old TV adverts come in for the biggest skewering
of all – terrible, terrible products like Sugar Frosted Milk, powdered toast,
and the infamous log from Blammo – are sold to their fictional audiences with
wholesome smiles and jingles. One could go on and on … from memory, creator
John Kricfalusi liked the old Disney cartoons, but at the time Ren & Stimpy
came out he hated the ‘Christmas card’ stuff they were producing.

For me, three moments soared above the rest, and had me cackling
as much or even more than I did as a kid:

2)Ren and Stimpy dancing along manically to the ‘Happy
Happy Joy Joy’ song, with Ren forced into being happy by Stimpy’s
mind-altering helmet, and singer Stinky Wizzleteats muttering less-than-happy
interludes; and

Friday, December 20, 2013

Today the Fair Work Commission released two research reports
authored by the Workplace Research Centre – one with the rather broad heading
of ‘Award
reliance’, and the other on the more specific topic of ‘Minimum
wages and their role in the process and incentives to bargain’. In the latter report, the WRC made the
interesting finding that Australian employers and employees generally reported
that increases to minimum/award rates of pay through the annual wage review
neither encouraged nor discouraged enterprise bargaining at the workplace
level.

I must admit I haven’t read the whole thing, so I don’t know
how well their evidence stacks up. But assuming it does, it seems like on the surface a
further ‘nail in the coffin’ for dollar increases to minimum wages for the
short-term at least. One of the arguments used to justify dollar increases was
that it resulted in higher percentage increases to workers on the lower award
rates of pay, and lessened the financial disincentives for workers on the
higher award rates of pay to bargain. If minimum wage increases don’t really
affect bargaining much at all, then this argument has less potency. (Although the
finding seems to be primarily based on interviews at only 20 workplaces so we
shouldn’t get too carried away here.) And in its most recent decision, the
Fair Work Commission seemed even less prepared to revisit the possibility of
dollar increases than I thought it might be.

Personally though, while I’m hardly going to go on a crusade
about it or anything, I’ve gradually decided I’m in favour of percentage
increases. Dollar increases, particularly when maintained over a couple of
decades, seem like a rather passive-aggressive way of reducing the relevance of
award rates of pay. Either we as a society want a minimum wage premium for
skill, and we should keep the various minimum pay rates for different skill
levels, or we just want an overall minimum wage (like the US and the UK) and we
don’t. (Yeah, yeah, I know politically it’s not that simple …) And if we’re
going down the first route, what’s the justification for letting the wage
premium for skill deteriorate over time? I think there’s a case, which I’ve
kind of argued before, for increasing all the award rates by an amount that
is more or less equal to average wage growth each year, assuming you have the levels about right. Even if there was just
one standard adult minimum rate of pay – which I think is very unlikely to
happen in any case – I’d make much the same argument.

If you’ve got this far, thanks for reading my pontificating.
Have a good Christmas folks!

Monday, December 16, 2013

ECONOMICS: Last week I typed the words ‘best
economics sites’ into Google, and came up with this page. It has
a good mix of economics and economic policy sites, from both the left and right
sides. The posts below though, which I found through the sites listed on the
page – or through the links on the sites listed on the page – have a bit more
‘novelty value’:

Saturday, December 14, 2013

This month, I named Dave Eggers’ ‘The Circle’ my
best book of 2013, which doesn’t mean that I would hold it up as the
supreme literary achievement of the past 12 months, but that it was my
favourite book I read. I was always going to be pre-disposed to like it, given
that it shares similarities with Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ and
particularly George Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, both of which are among my
all-time favourite novels. Indeed, it’s a common cliché, but this is one time
that I think it rings true – I expect that most people who love either of those
books will love this too (and if you didn’t like them, then probably give this
a miss).

The story revolves around the character of young Mae
Holland, who has been recruited to the world’s biggest internet company the
Circle, which is like a mega-Google, a hyper-Facebook, or a
super-duper-YouTube. The Circle takes their vision of being not only a business
but a huge social community (though the two are intertwined) very seriously,
and they expect their employees to do so as well. Finding out just how crazy
the Circle is forms most of the intrigue in this book, even though none of it
is particularly surprising. But perhaps, as Orwell wrote, ‘The best books … are
those that tell you what you know already.’

After reading this book, some might be half-tempted to immediately
shut down their Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts … though I think I’ll
keep mine. Eggers’ portrayal of a world obsessed with watching each other may
be exaggerated, but readers will surely recognise some of their own strands of
behaviour in the characters’ continual quests for followers and likes. ‘The
Circle’ has enough postmodern goodies, including discussions about what is the
real self, and the boundaries between the private and public spheres to get it
included on dozens of college and university reading lists. But like Orwell’s
classic, it is accessible enough to get it on the large bookstore chains’ Top 100 favourite
books lists as well. Mindless reality TV stole the concept of Big Brother, this
book takes it back.

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Christmas is the time of year where we drag out
those old Christmas albums and listen to the same twenty songs over and over
again, because that’s what we always do at Christmas, right? Wrong. There’s no
excuse for being lulled into sleep by hearing some choir crawl though ‘The
First Noel’ or ‘Silent Freaking Night’, or even Wham’s ‘Last Christmas’. Hence,
a few years back I put together a list of Christmas tracks that I hadn’t heard
five hundred times already. When I host Christmas, these are the songs I’ll be
a-playing, as they stand the least chance (even if some non-zero
chance) of me getting totally and utterly sick of them.

The Killers have always varied between glorious and
ridiculous, and this song is both. Some kid has been very, very naughty by
killing other children ‘just for fun’, and now Jolly Ol’ Nick has dropped by to
give him his comeuppance. It’s not wholesome, but it is fun. When I have kids,
I’ll wait until the grandparents are out of the room before playing them this
one.

Joan Jett’s ‘I Love Rock ‘N’ Roll’ is
unfortunately another of those songs I’ve heard far too often in my lifetime.
But this track off the same album was a pleasant surprise, and reinvigorated a
carol that I loved as a kid but grew tired of as I got older. Jett’s
pronunciation of Jesus, and the growling rum-rums in the background give this
version even more of a novel twist. Sidenote: when I was a kid I thought the
line ‘The ox and ass kept time’ was ‘The optimus prime’. I was so excited there
was this ‘optimus prime’ character in the Christmas legend that I hadn’t known
about. God, I was disappointed when I found out what it really was.

Nowadays this song, like a lot of the Darkness’
catalogue, risks being as tacky as all the Christmas carols I’ve just skewered,
but somehow I still like it. And I admire the Darkness’ gumption in trying to
get the Christmas number one, even though they narrowly lost. Plus, it’s
perfect for annoying half your relatives – in my case, wife included, who
thoroughly despises anything Darkness-related.

This actually wasn’t on my playlist when I made
it a few years back, but it certainly would be on there now. Having Shane
MacGowan slur about being drunk on Christmas Eve may seem like an obvious move
in hindsight, but only because the song was written. While the lyrics are
regretful, the music is suitably joyful for the festive season.

And here you have it – my favourite Christmas
song ever. Ray Davies sings about dressing up as Santa Claus and getting beaten
up a gang of kids, who take his money and leave the toys. It’s like a tale from
the secret underbelly of Christmas, and while I don’t endorse it as being in
the spirit of the season, it’s the one I’m most likely to be humming as I dig
for coins in my Christmas pudding.

And here is
my personal favourite for 2013 for every category that matters to me. Which of
course means that without these things your year was woefully incomplete:

Best Book:
The Circle – Dave Eggers

Best Album: …
Like Clockwork – Queens of the Stone Age (though the album – an oldie – that I
got most into this year was the Manic Street Preachers’ ‘The Holy Bible’)

Best Song:
Get Lucky – Daft Punk

Best TV
Show: Game of Thrones, just ahead of Mad Men. Just. And frankly, it was probably because of these.

Best Film: Silver
Linings Playbook – OK, it was probably released in 2012, but that and Lincoln
(also probably released in 2012) were way above anything else I saw this
calendar year. But I haven’t seen Gravity.

Best Comic:
Saga – Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples (I didn’t need to change this line
from last year)Best Sporting
Event: Game 6 of the Miami Heat v San Antonio Spurs NBA Finals. While I’m not a
Heat fan, it was funny to watch all those faux-Spurs supporting people in the
last 30 seconds of that game who were taking joy out of LeBron James’ upcoming ‘failure’
go deathly, deathly silent. And whatever the result, it was a fantastic game –
possibly the best NBA game ever. Game 7 was awesome as well.

Wednesday, December 4, 2013

As I’ve already said in a previous review I love the ‘Batman:
Arkham City’ game, as I do its predecessor (though I played it
subsequently) ‘Batman: Arkham Asylum’. Hence, I was pretty psyched for the
release of the newest instalment in the series, ‘Batman: Arkham Origins’. On
25.10.2013 my friend and I went down to buy our copies, and on 26.10 I set
about installing it on my PC.

Well, as it says on the front of the package an internet
connection is required to activate the game – this is because you need to
connect to some ‘Steam’ network thingy, don’t know why, but hey if that’s what
is required then I’ll click. Anyway, the game was downloading fine, and then I
went away for a few minutes, and came back and … the download had essentially
ground to a halt. It was stuck at about 87%, and increasing at the rate of about
90kbps/sec, and there was an estimated 21 hours left to download. What had
happened?

Then I had the horrid thought – maybe my data allowance has
been used up. My current data allowance is about 2GB per month (70 per cent of
the Western world would probably laugh at this statement). Sure enough, it had,
which was doubly annoying as my data allowance for the month had just started 3
days ago. (Lucky I have no extra charge for going over the limit, otherwise I
may still be in the hospital.)

So, there you have it – in this case I was such a shit gamer
with a shit data allowance that I couldn’t even get the game to start. My
efforts to connect to a free Wi-Fi network and download the game have also
proved fruitless. I’ve heard it’s good. I hope I get to play it someday. But as
of now, it’s still just an icon on my desktop …